Rock the Red, Po Russki!

I don't know the answer to this question, but has any U.S. sports franchise ever embraced the Cyrillic alphabet than the '09 Caps? I mean, the number of Cyrillic items for sale in the team's gift shops is truly remarkable. I wish you could pay in Rubles. Plus, has anyone made Caps nesting dolls yet? That's a must.

These say Rock the Red, apparently, and they've been available for about three weeks. I'd like one, but I try to remain sports agnostic in my apparel. And red makes me look pasty.

Continuing the love of Mother Russia, here's Lindsay Czarniak and Sergei Fedorov dining at the Russia House. That would seem to reinforce my previous posting about the Caps spending New Year's Eve there. It also made me think back to that Ukrainian meal with Oleksiy Pecherov. Memories. (Via OFB.)

I wonder if you told someone from the 1950's that our nation capital's hockey team would exhort our fans to "Rock the Red", two of our best players are Russian, and we sell t-shirts with Cryllic writing on them, that he'd believe we won the Cold War.

It actually says, "The red banner forward!" (Krasnoye znamya vperyod!) which is actually a Soviet-era Communist slogan. (Which would be kind of depressing to run into if your Grandpa had died in the gulag. But let's not open that whole can of worms again.)